Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has rebuilt the company’s board just weeks after its previous directors tried, and failed, to oust him. The board, which was announced to staff Friday, is an eclectic group that includes a best-selling science-fiction author and two co-founders of the now-defunct social app IRL, TechCrunch has learned, and Mullenweg has confirmed. The new board is the latest twist in ...

Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe Machines are getting brighter. Teens are getting dimmer. Schools must act now Schools in RICH countries are failing. The latest scores on PISA tests of reading, maths and science, released on September 8th, are the worst since the tests, administered by the OECD, began in 2000. Educators can no longer blame it all on covid-19 lockdowns, which badl...

OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US government agency sites OpenAI has acknowledged that it alerted "dozens" of global institutions that their websites may have been meddled with by its AI bots acting improperly. AI agents attempted to get information from "governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions", including the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Census Bureau...

The Provenance Tax: Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior Recently, Anthropic announced that future Claude models would embed an invisible watermark in their output [1], [2], and subsequently disclosed that the watermark is based on Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text [2], [3]. Text watermarking itself is not new, but its deployment now has regulatory relevance. Article 50(2...

What does Arthur Mensch, co-founder of French start-up Mistral AI, think of the warnings about the risks of artificial intelligence, including the prospect of an "AI-pocalypse," that have circulated since OpenAI software hacked the Hugging Face platform's servers in July? The CEO of the French startup believes American tech giants are using such rhetoric to control and close off the market to thei...

Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free Conversations, my federated instant messaging client for Android, started out as many traditional open-source projects do: as an attempt to scratch my own itch. Development started in January 2014 in my student dormitory, and within weeks I started dogfooding and using the client as the primary means of communicating with my friends. Howe...

The Copilot+ PC brand is dead: Microsoft and PC makers quietly pull back on tarnished Windows 11 AI PC branding In a new interview, Microsoft Surface CVP confirms that its new Surface PCs are no longer called Copilot+ PCs, but will still support all Copilot+ features. In 2024, Microsoft and Qualcomm kicked off a new category of Windows hardware it called "Copilot+ PCs" that set the baseline for a ...

Are you steering towards AI burnout? Afraid of loosing your job to someone with little programming skills, no aspirations to quality, and a huge Claude account? Disappointed about the code quality in your projects, or worse in “your” own code? This is for you. There are significant and legitimate ethical concerns about frontier LLMs run by big tech companies, these have been discussed at length, I...

When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢ either. There was no way to get around the cultural knowledge required by the te...

[This is a guest post by Amit Sahai. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When I was an undergraduate student, I remember talking with several students who felt that the pace at which the top students could understand new math concepts was far too fast for them. They, too, could understand the ideas, but it would take them much longer. Event...